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SAP 2015 – Simplify and Innovate

It is 2015, and the IT landscape is changing at a whirlwind speed. Disruptive and transformative breakthroughs in cloud-delivery capabilities, mobile technology, social media and big-data analytics compel business leaders to innovate on a scale never before possible.

However, nurturing and evolving legacy assets and capabilities built up over past decades is draining IT dollars and stifling your organization’s ability to respond – strategically, intelligently, quickly and opportunistically.

Today’s business leaders must ask the question: Am I burning money to keep the lights on or investing in IT to drive business innovation?

Analysts agree that we can expect solid growth for IT spending in 2015:

Pundit predictions for 2015

Worldwide IT spending is on pace to total $3.8 trillion in 2015, a 2.4 percent increase from 2014. (Gartner)

Global IT spend will grow by 5.3 percent in local currency terms, with enterprise software winning the greatest spending increase this year at $620 billion. (Forrester)

Overall spending on tech and telecom will rise by 3.8% next year to more than $3.8 trillion, but there will be growth of 13% in what the research firm calls 3rd Platform technologies such as cloud, mobile, social and Big Data. (IDC)

Investing strategically in technology is paramount. To a greater extent than ever before, successful companies rely on technology not simply to keep the lights on but more vitally, to differentiate their product or service, achieve a sustainable competitive edge, and introduce new products or services.

Complexity – the innovation killer

The root of innovation lies in the cloud, big-data analytics, and real-time, anyone, any-device reporting. But the anchor holding innovation back, complexity, is formidable.

As we see at clients every day, complexity is the dark force that inevitably ratchets up costs in SAP landscapes, leading to bloated cost structures and operational instability.

More specifically, complexity born of workarounds needed to deal with exponential data growth and constrained resources -- processing power, memory, speed -- has led to database sprawl and reliance on inefficient disc-based database management systems.

Data is quickly becoming the most important asset in the enterprise. The data required for effective decision making resides in numerous places throughout the enterprise -- databases, data warehouses, operational applications, transactional systems, the Internet/Intranet, etc.

Realizing the promise of big-data analytics/BI necessitates pulling all of this disparate data together in real time without disrupting business, and without adding additional complexity.

HANA – simplification and innovation

SAP has made it clear that HANA is the future, and that HANA is the platform for every single thing the company will do going forward.

Most recently, SAP announced S/4 HANA, the successor to Business Suite with re-written code to leverage SAP HANA transactional and real-time analytical capabilities and a simplified end-user interface based on SAP Fiori.

It is not incidental that the new Business Suite is built only for SAP HANA -- SAP’s breakthrough in-memory platform -- in order to vanquish all limitations and complexity of the past.

Of course, the performance boost HANA delivers is extraordinary, empowering businesses to run in real time -- to transact, analyze and predict instantly on a single platform at the moment of opportunity.

SAP customers (existing and prospective) are well advised to take a hard look at how SAP HANA can transform their business, and begin mapping out a strategy for HANA adoption that makes sense for their business.

More pointedly, as we move into 2015, companies of all sizes and across all industries should examine the costs and limitations complexity has forced upon them. And then evaluate how HANA can free them from this constraint -- and open the floodgates of innovation.

If you’re throwing away the lion’s share of IT budget on feeding complexity simply to keep the lights on, then chances are good that you’re being out innovated by the competition.

To facilitate this process, we encourage SAP customers, new and prospective, to test drive HANA today at one of the two NTT DATA SAP Solution Centers in North America.